Brilliant Blunders

Drawing on the lives of five great scientists, this scholarly, insightful, and beautifully written book (Martin Rees, author of From Here to Infinity) illuminates the path to scientific discovery.Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein all made groundbreaking contributions to their fieldsbut each also stumbled badly. Darwins theory of natural selection shouldnt have worked, according to the prevailing beliefs of his time. Lord Kelvin gravely miscalculated the age of the earth. Linus Pauling, the worlds premier chemist, constructed an erroneous model for DNA in his haste to beat the competition to publication. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle dismissed the idea of a Big Bang origin to the universe (ironically, the caustic name he gave to this event endured long after his erroneous objections were disproven). And Albert Einstein speculated incorrectly about the forces of the universeand that speculation opened the door to brilliant conceptual leaps. As Mario Livio luminously explains in this thoughtful meditation on the course of science itself (The New York Times Book Review), these five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on earth, the evolution of the earth, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors. Thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written (The Washington Post), Brilliant Blunders is a wonderfully insightful examination of the psychology of five fascinating scientistsand the mistakes as well as the achievements that made them famous.